Mobile Or Desktop, Website Or App: What's The Best Way To Shop This Holiday Season?

Nikki Baird
, ContributorI focus on the digital consumer’s impact on retail.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Since the dawn of Cyber Monday, when consumers would come home from shopping in stores all Black Friday weekend, only to turn around and use high-speed connections at work on Monday to finish up their shopping lists, retailers have observed that consumers are using different digital channels for different objectives.

Over the past few years, holiday shopping has reflected some of these shifts. Online sales are growing far faster than store sales, and within online, mobile is capturing a larger share of traffic – but mobile still drags far behind desktop and even tablet experiences when it comes to sales.

Retailers also have not invested evenly across their digital channels. Just because a retailer's desktop website is a great experience, it doesn’t mean its mobile site – or app – has kept up.

Over the years, I’ve evaluated lots of retailer experiences from the consumer perspective – digital gift cards, desktop vs. mobile, personalization. I’ve learned some counter-intuitive things about retailers’ digital channels, and, if you’re looking to score the best deals with the least amount of hassle, you will find you might want to use different channels for different things.

Personalization

If you want the most personalized experience, your best bet is to shop the desktop site. By personalized experience, I mean, where recommended products evolve based on your browsing history, where cart abandonment might best trigger a follow-up email for free shipping or an additional discount, and where past search and browsing history is remembered, so that you can go back and find that item that you liked yesterday, but didn’t buy.

A lot of retailers have implemented tools that help personalize their desktop websites in just these ways, but have not taken those tools to mobile. Additionally, some retailers optimize personalization differently for mobile shopping (where the conversion rate is lower) than they do for desktop shopping (where the conversion rate is higher), which means you might see different (and fewer) product recommendations on the mobile web than you do on the desktop site.

Speed

Counter-intuitive to what you might expect, if you want a faster experience, you should try the retailer’s mobile site first, especially if you’re on WiFi. One might expect that the desktop site would be the fastest experience, but what has happened is that retailers, knowing that mobile is not the best experience and can be impacted depending on the network you’re on, have done more to optimize mobile to be fast to make up for those bandwidth lags. Not only have they invested in tools to make page loading faster on mobile, they have done a lot to streamline the navigation experience on mobile.

That streamlining works great if you’re laser-focused on something you need to buy, but a lot of times it puts the shopper at a disadvantage when it comes to browsing, because it means you have to narrow your filter a lot more to get to actual product images than you would have to filter down to on the desktop site – the tradeoff is, you get to a limited number of selections very quickly, but you see less of the options than you would on the desktop.

Insider Deals

Finally mobile apps have something of a bad reputation in retail circles, because consumers are pretty unwilling to add more apps to their phone just for the sake of having apps. If you’re not a regular Macy’s shopper, odds are, you don’t have and don’t want the Macy’s app. But there are instances where it pays to have the app. Retailers are increasingly providing unique offers to app wallets, and more retailers are using an “in-store” mode to give shoppers access to store-only deals, delivered through the app. The retailer rule of thumb is, sites are for customer acquisition, and apps are for customer retention. If you suspect a retailer is investing more in lavishing attention on existing customers, it’s worth it to get the app to benefit from that.

Finding The Best Experience

Where do you get the best experience, as we get closer to the “official” kickoff to the holiday season? Here’s how to figure out where retailers have invested to provide the best experience, and where they haven’t.

The best way to tell if a retailer personalizes the website experience is to first access the site via a private browser window and search for a few products, and then try that again while logged in to your account. You should do this for both desktop and mobile site. Some things to look for:

Does the site try to auto-complete your search terms? Sometimes this is more apparent on the mobile site, mostly because people type slower on mobile than they do on desktop. I find that a lot of autocomplete searches have a lag, and it can actually take longer to autocomplete than I can type on desktop.

Does the site remember past searches? Look for this either in the autocomplete of the search bar, or on the page itself. On the home page, Amazon tends to put past searches front and center. On most other retailers’ home pages, it’s way down at the bottom of the page. Same goes for product detail pages. On mobile, some retailers will drop past history, or will limit the results in order to provide a faster experience.

When you search for a term and the site shows you the results, does the order of the results change on desktop vs. mobile? Some brands have gotten in trouble in the past for “personalizing” results based on the browser you used to search. Orbitz got in trouble for showing higher-priced hotels higher up in the search results for those coming to their site via Safari than it did for users from other browsers, under the assumption that Mac users were willing to pay more for hotels. The same principle can apply to phone vs. desktop or laptop as well, so check to see if search results are the same across the devices you use.

Also check the recommended products on product detail pages across devices. For example, in a recent search I did on Target’s site, the recommended products to “complete the look” were different on desktop than they were on mobile.

After you’ve viewed some products, go back to the home page. Does it change? Do the images on the home page change? Does the order of the content on the home page change? Most times, the answer is going to be no, but there are some retailers who do actually personalize to that level of detail. Retailers are more likely to “personalize” based on the device your using than based on anything that they know about you, and mostly in the name of providing a faster mobile experience.

Some retailers are also trying to increase a sense of personalization by providing social content, for example, sharing user-submitted photos of products. Sephora has an excellent example of how to manage those photos and personalize them yourself. Most other retailers don’t have enough user-generated content for their social investments to provide a lot of value. And this is an area that tends to get dropped on the mobile site.

Now, log in to your account. Does the home page change? Does the site still remember your past searches? Do recommended products update to a different set now that the retailer knows who you are?

Once you’ve logged in, repeat your past searches. Does the order of the search results change, now that the retailer knows who you are? If you start clicking on products, do the results change order? Those are both signs that the retailer is reordering the priority for what it shows you, based on either what the retailer knows about you, or your behavior in that particular session.

A lot more retailers are offering wallets or offers as part of your user account, so you should also check if the retailer has something like that set up for you. Usually that’s in the Account or Preferences section of the site, depending on the retailer. To get a sense for where a retailer is prioritizing their experience, you should check desktop vs. mobile vs. app for offers. For example, in my Macy’s account, I only had one offer shown to me in my wallet on the desktop site, and 17 offers available on the mobile site – and the desktop offer wasn’t one of the 17 on mobile, either.

For mobile app, look for the store locator, as this is the place where some retailers will let you know about an “in-store” mode. You can do that without necessarily sharing your location, just by using a zip code that you know is close to (or the address of) the store you’re interested in. Mobile apps increasingly offer scanning to check prices, scan-and-buy to locate different colors or sizes. Some retailers have invested in beacons in stores that will talk to your app and offer you different or extra deals than you may see otherwise.

The Bottom Line

Don’t assume that every experience is the same no matter how you engage with the retailer. They have not made an even level of investment across all of their digital channels, and sometimes have made strategic decisions to make one experience faster or more personalized, or have better deals. Every retailer is different, but whether you’re looking to be laser-focused, looking for ideas, or looking for deals, it might be worth the effort to figure out the best place to achieve those objectives. It might not be through the device or browser that you expected it to be.

Nikki Baird is a vice president of retail innovation at Aptos, a retail enterprise solution provider. Her opinions are her own.